Friday Wrap: Yellowstone fans outed, Marvel movie malaise, and Lana Del Rey's new seven-minute song

For today's weekly wrap-up, Commotion's panel of experts crossed space, time and planes of existence.

Culture writers Kathryn VanArendonk, Niko Stratis and Kathleen Newman-Bremang joined host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about everything from the puzzling appeal of Yellowstone and the rumoured departure of its star Kevin Costner, to Lana Del Rey's bold decision to release a seven-minute song in a TikTok-dominated music market, to Marvel's latest offering — and whether we even want it at this point.

We've included some highlights below. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Is Kevin Costner riding off into the sunset on Yellowstone?

Elamin: I want to start by talking about Yellowstone. And the reason I want to start talking about Yellowstone is, it's not a show that your cool Internet friends talk about a lot, but it is a phenomenon. I myself watched it over four or five days because I had COVID in the summer and I was in my basement, and I did nothing else but watch Yellowstone and I came out a libertarian on the other side. 

You'd think that that's a pretty good gig if you're a TV actor but apparently not, because some reports have emerged suggesting that Kevin Costner [the star of Yellowstone] actually might want to throw the future of Yellowstone away. There's a lot of drama in this. Kathryn, I'm going to start with you on this. I think it'd be good to maybe start by contextualizing the popularity of Yellowstone. It's not just me watching it in a basement, right?

Kathryn: No, although I cannot tell you how many people I have heard from who are like, "you know, I had COVID, and I just somehow watched all of Yellowstone." Like, I think we really need to be frightened about co-morbidities here. But Yellowstone is, even without the pandemic, a bona fide phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon in ways that are a little bit surprising because the shows that have tended to get that much of an audience share tend to be streaming shows — your Wednesdays, your Squid Games or the buzzy HBO-Sunday-night kinds of things that you can also watch on a streaming platform and catch up throughout the week. It is astonishing to me that Yellowstone is so hard to watch if you want to go stream it somewhere in the United States. 

Elamin: It's not easy in Canada either.

Kathryn: Yeah. It's not available on the same streaming platform that it airs on as a channel in the United States. And it is a linear show. Basically, you need a cable package or you need to say, "sure, I'll just pay $20 for this season of this show." And yet, it has been wildly, wildly popular here, and that audience has not petered out. It continues to grow as each season comes out.

Elamin: Right, and there's something about Kevin Costner's character as this sort of stoic-old-white male who is a familiar figure, but maybe not a very contemporary figure. And maybe Kathleen, that's a reason why a lot of people don't write about this show. What do you make of the fact that it is so popular and yet so few people talk about it? You watch the show, and you don't even talk about it. You're like a secret, closeted Yellowstone watcher. Out yourself. 

Kathleen: Wow. I mean, first of all, I live with a white man, so that's who I blame for the fact that I watch Yellowstone. But I did try to write about Yellowstone in a piece tentatively titled, "Are Black People Watching Yellowstone? An Investigation." But barely anyone wanted to go on record to say that they were watching–

Elamin: For the record, I did. I wanted to go on the record–

Kathleen: Except for you.

Elamin: That's right. It's true.

Kathleen: And I think it's because as you said, it is not cool. Its core audiences are older, male, very middle-America — not necessarily the demo of people who are extremely online. And I don't think it has that self-aware, eat-the-rich vibe that Succession does, it doesn't have a youth element like Euphoria does, it very earnestly has the energy of Make America Great Again … So it's messy, and I just think it's a little embarrassing to say out loud that you love Yellowstone. So if anyone asks, I have never seen a single episode.

Elamin: Wow, I am left out in the cold as the only person who's ever seen an episode of Yellowstone. That's fine. So the reason we're talking about this this week is that Kevin Costner is supposed to start shooting Yellowstone again in March, but there's been all these reports from very reputable sources that there are conflicts with his shooting schedule. And Kathryn, there's all these rumors that he's kind of angling for an exit. Is that surprising to you, this idea that the biggest star on the biggest show would say five seasons in, "alright, this is over for me."? 

Kathryn: No, not particularly, given Kevin Costner's general reputation as being an actor who feels like he wants to have a lot of say over the role that he takes in a show, and the the fact that he has been a movie star for his entire career. When you do a movie, you sign onto the movie, it takes a certain number of months, maybe it's a year, to do a movie, that's your life — and then you get to leave. And TV goes for a long, long time and, unless he wants this to be sort of the last big project he ever does, he is going to need to leave so that he can become a director, so that he can do other things. And, it's also hard work having to get off and on all of those horses over and over again. And when you shoot out in the middle of nowhere, you become much more distanced from a sort of general production, the ability to be involved in all the meetings you need to do to do other things. No, I'm not particularly surprised.

Aren't we all Marvel-ed out by now?

Elamin: Niko, it's been 15 years since the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We've followed this brand for, at this point, 32 movies. How much Marvel is too much? Are we at our breaking point? Help me.

Niko: You said 15 years and my bones just turned to dust.

Elamin: That's Iron Man, 2008.

Niko: I mean, I still can't believe we started this thing with Iron Man, a comic book character that nobody cared about at all, and 15 years later we're still making these things.

Elamin: And billions of dollars.

Niko: Billions of dollars. It is such a feat.

Elamin: Do you still care?

Niko: I do. And if everybody's outing themselves with their fandom today, I am a big Marvel person. I grew up reading comics, but I find the movies to be really tiring. I didn't see the last Doctor Strange one because I just was like, who has the time? You know?

Elamin: Doctor Strange does, the whole thing is he plays with time. My question is about Marvel fatigue, Kathryn, because it feels like we should be approaching the point of getting exhausted with Marvel. I'm not sure that we are, because alongside the movies they've also launched, at this point, a dozen different TV shows; they're not slowing down anytime soon. Is the interest in them slowing down?

Kathryn: I think it is. I think it's interesting that even though they have launched all these TV shows, very few of them have release dates for new seasons this year. Which is not to say there won't be any, but I have not seen that schedule come out so far. The other thing that I think is really fascinating is Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Entertainment, came out and said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he wants all of the Marvel TV shows to become more episodic, which to me is great. I love episodic television. But, it also signals this awareness that you have to give people a full story inside an episode because something about what they have been getting already has not been satisfying to them. And the way that all these big interconnected universes have been also kicking the can of narrative satisfaction just down the road, farther and farther and farther, I think is finally starting to catch up with them as far as how they are building these stories. If there is this much story, but also it never pays off, you are going to have a hard time with an audience wanting to come back again and again.

Elamin: What you're describing is my experience with Moon Knight, the series starring Oscar Isaac, the one that I'm convinced not a single person in the world saw.

Kathleen: I watched one episode. 

Elamin: Niko, what do you want to see Marvel do with their series?

Niko: You know, Star Wars did a really interesting thing with Andor. I loved Star Wars when I was a kid, and I got so burnt out on Star Wars, like I just stopped caring. And Andor came in, and I all of a sudden realized, "oh, I love this world, if they were willing to do something interesting with it." And it's the first Star Wars thing that doesn't even have a John Williams score. It just feels like they need to find something new that tells a story in this world. The episodic thing is perfect because comic books are like that, right? They're not these things that tie into a grander universe, they're small snippets of stories that don't have to connect to each other. Watching TV shouldn't be homework.

Why did Lana Del Ray release a seven-minute song?

Elamin: Lana Del Rey released a seven-minute single called A&W from her highly anticipated album, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Lana has had this aesthetic of a certain kind of American era that has gone by that she's really fixated on. And Niko, I could never tell if Lana Del Rey is serious or if this is a persona. Because I look at her and I go, "this is not pastiche. You're deadly serious about this." When you listen to the new Lana Del Rey song, what do you make of it?

Niko: I do think I think she's a pastiche of herself. She moves through these iterations of herself and she's constantly creating herself as a persona. We never know who the real Lana Del Rey is, and I don't think we're meant to know who the real Lana Del Rey is. I think she is always sort of a variation on a theme. When I first heard A&W, and you're like "seven-minute single? Okay, we're back to this," because she's done this where she made a nine-minute song. You listen to it and it's like, okay, we're moving through. It's the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Lana Del Rey. We're moving through it, right? It is very cinematic, and it is very interesting to hear all these layers of her laid out on a line.

Elamin: There's something to me that's fascinating about watching Lana do her work, Kathleen, because what she's done is continually refined her voice and to me that's interesting because she's, in a way, writing her public persona and repeatedly being like, "I'm not lying to you. I really am like this." She worked with Jack Antonoff on this record, and anyone who works with Jack tends to take on some Jack characteristics, which is kind of bothersome to me, but this sounds like Lana Del Rey. What do you make of the collaboration between one of the biggest producers in pop [music] and then Lana Del Rey?

Kathleen: I mean, I think they're both really interesting. And also, this entire episode has been a ploy from you, Elamin, to get me to publicly admit that I watch Yellowstone and listen to Taylor Swift's songs.

Elamin: My favorite day of the week. I love this day.

Kathleen: I do really appreciate a good Jack Antonoff-produced track, and so I think this collaboration is really interesting because both of these pop culture figures, Jack Antonoff and Lana Del Rey, are pretty divisive. They got popular doing a signature sound really well, and then they both kind of became punchlines for it, or the fatigue kind of set in, I think, because of their popularity. And I think this song is some of their most interesting work, maybe because it doesn't have as much of that Jack Antonoff signature that people are sick of right now, but also because I think the Lana Del Rey lore is that she is just made from a machine and she's not real, and I think this song feels like it has a depth and a realness to it that I haven't heard in a long time.

Elamin: Kathryn, I'm curious about your perspective about the fact that this song is seven minutes long. We are inundated with all these sort of 30 second-to-one minute soundbites that work really well on TikTok. Is this as radical as some people make it out to be?

Kathryn: I don't think so. There have been long songs forever, and it's not like TikTok cannot clip the bit that they're going to decide [is a trend]. I mean, picking that one moment that switches to a synth pop, or later when the song starts to incorporate like American camp songs, I think is going to be very easy to pull out. I love a long song.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.